Paid search is fundamentally about presenting a relevant ad to someone who enters a keyword in a search engine. Every month, 60% of the searches on Google are brand new. With the keyword list being the pillar of the paid search campaign, keyword selection is essential. Technology now exists to scrape a page and cull a list, but the fundamental strategies for effective keyword selection remain the same now as they have been for years. Here are some of the basic keyword selection tactics that apply to the retail vertical.

Top Sellers: Site analytics can determine the top selling products through direct load and natural search. These words should be part of the paid search campaign.

Top Searched Products on the Site: Site analytics can inform what people are searching for on the site, and these words should be included in the paid search campaign. Products being searched for but not sold by the merchant should be given to the merchandising team to potentially expand the product line.

Research Tools: Hitwise, comScore Marketer, Compete and Keyword Spy are all great sources to identify not only the top keywords driving traffic to a competitor’s site, but also to identify the top keywords driving natural traffic to the company for whom the paid search keyword list is being developed. Keyword coverage in both paid and natural search ultimately adds up to more revenue for the advertiser as it creates additional real estate for the advertiser on the search engine.

Website: It’s a laborious process, but making sure all products on the website have relevant keywords is essential as is ensuring that category terms make the list, as well. It is the category terms that will drive the most volume and the product-specific terms that will yield the best conversion rate.

Catalog:  If the paid search advertiser also has a catalog, ensure that there is maximum keyword coverage on products featured in the catalog as well as ensuring that best sellers have maximum exposure.

Datafeed:  Most merchants have a datafeed that’s used for various purposes. Identifying new items in the feed is a great way to ensure that new products don’t slip through the cracks. Additionally, active keywords for products that are no longer in the feed should be paused.

Search Engine Tools: The search engines make lots of free resources available for recommending like keywords to the base word that was input.

Plurals:  For the life of me, I don’t know why a singular (or plural) version of a keyword that is at the top of the best performers list is also at the bottom for the opposite version of the word (singular or plural).  Anyone who has seen lots of paid search results will recognize this curious dynamic.  For this reason, every keyword needs both plural and singular versions of the word to be covered.

Search Query Reports:  Refer to the search query reports provided by the search engines to identify the actual words someone entered into the search engine in order for an ad to be displayed.  Refine the keyword list and match type strategy based on these findings.

Google Insights for Search: This free tool shows rising searches related to a particular keyword enabling a campaign to yield scale quickly.

Synonyms:  If you sell women’s clothing, ensure that you have all variations of women’s (ladies, girls, etc) and add these variations to the base of every keyword.

Once the keyword list is developed, give it a reality check.  Many merchants name their products with language that is not common to the public.  Cosmetics companies may refer to “fragrances,” whereas the majority of searchers will be looking for “perfume.”  Make sure your product can be found by emulating consumer behavior and by applying common sense.

Suzy Sandberg is President of PM Digital.

PM Digital’s 4Q & Holiday 2009 Rewind report has been released with a look at paid search performance for retailers during the 2009 holiday season.  And as the study quickly points out, what a difference a year makes.  With 12 months’ distance from the bleakness of late 2008—a season in which e-commerce holiday sales actually dropped—online shoppers in 2009 seemed ready to buy with a renewed commitment to enjoy the holidays.

While research firm comScore cited 5% growth for online retailers, PM Digital’s clients saw paid search demand grow 19% on average.  Clicks, conversion and average order value were all up.

Overall, the data reported for Holiday 2009 conformed to patterns predicted one year ago, patterns which have become even more pronounced. Cyber Monday was again the top day for clicks, orders and demand; Black Friday again kicked off a surge in demand and orders that lasted for the first two weeks in December and spilled over into the third.

Looking ahead, Holiday 2010 will bring one more shopping day than 2009, plus an additional Monday on which it may be possible to ship orders. While consumer sentiment and, more importantly, unemployment figures remain an unknown for late 2010, successful search marketers must continue to measure, optimize and budget for key dates, and to leverage timely sales, free shipping, and other incentives.  Social media will evolve further in 2010 and will garner even more buzz, but the bulk of demand will continue to be generated by paid search, especially Google and Bing.

If you’re interested in receiving a full copy of PM Digital’s 4Q & Holiday 2009 Rewind, send an email with your contact information to info@pmdigital.com.

The strong weekend results for online sales is icing on the cake to a strong overall holiday season for ecommerce.  As has been reported by comScore and others, online sales are up year over year in 2009 vs. 2008, so there is a lot to celebrate.

Some of the key drivers in lifting sales this year in particular were 1) promotions; 2) gift cards; 3) egift cards) 4) accurate forecasting (running budgets high on the best days and scaling back on lower-converting days), and 5) taking advantage of best practices in search strategies.

Overall, we’ve seen larger retail budgets in 2009 vs. 2008, and for the majority of our clients, there has been little problem spending entire budgets within target ROI metrics.  While this is really good news for the channel, an implication is that we are seeing a big scaling back of paid search spend these last few days right before Christmas.

Most of our retail clients’ budgets were expended earlier in the season than retailers thought and definitely earlier than we experienced the year before.  In the 2008 holiday season, many more retailers were spending as much as they could butting right up to the holiday itself.  This year, those retailers who still have ample budget and are therefore continuing to spend as largely as they have been all season long will enjoy lower cpcs this week as large amounts of their retail competitors drop out either altogether or scale back to only the best performing keywords and dayparts as budgets dry up.

Based on the way retail performed this holiday online, we anticipate that the week between Christmas and New Year’s will exceed 2008 by double digits.

This initial write-up focuses on Hitwise and comScore Marketer, two of the major players that report on post-click data (i.e. not just ads served, but ads clicked).

Methodology: Hitwise’s primary data source is anonymous user data collected through ISP network relationships.  Search term data is calculated from the URL, including the query string.  Below is an example (emphasis added):

http://www.google.com/search?q=sweater

Hitwise augments its ISP-data with opt-in panels for demographic information like age and gender.  Specifics on the panel component are not fully detailed.

Search Data: Hitwise presents actual search terms used.  Clicks and “success” metrics are given to indicate website visits resulting from a search term.  A ratio of organic vs. paid clicks is also provided.  Hitwise does not approximate click numbers in its reporting, but instead presents its findings as shares or a proportion of total (i.e. “purple sweater” represented 7.5% of all traffic to Website X).   Demographics are available at the site level only.

Update Frequency: Hitwise search term updates are available approximately 24-48 hours following the end of a weekly period.  Data is not presented for a single week, however, but as part of a rolling 4 or 12-week period. 

Key Strengths: Timeliness and Breadth of Coverage.  A key benefit to Hitwise is the speed with which information becomes available.  This can be extremely helpful in monitoring movement and changes in a given market. Another upside to Hitwise’s ISP-based approach is that they tend to cover a large number of websites.  Small and mid-size marketers are likely to find competitive sites already actively tracked by Hitwise.

Methodology: comScore Marketer’s primary data source is an online panel that has opted-in to have their web activity monitored.  comScore recruits panelists through a variety of online benefits and incentives, including games, utilities and a green tree-planting initiative.  comScore puts its U.S. panel size at one million.

Search Data: comScore Marketer presents search terms used, with added functionality for broad and exact match.  A calculated number of paid and organic clicks are provided, as well as the ability to look at component words and phrases of a long tail term.   comScore Marketer also leverages both pre-click data (i.e. ads served) and post-click data (i.e. ads clicked) in its reporting.  Demographics are available at both the site and keyword level.

Update Frequency:  comScore Marketer data is updated monthly, available roughly three weeks after a month is over.  Data is available in monthly increments with the ability to choose any period between one to six months.

Key Strengths: Depth of Coverage and Calculated Clicks. comScore Marketer’s panel-based methodology tracks all user activity, so the aggregation and computation of that data can sometimes offer marketers deeper insight into user behavior and intent. comScore Marketer provides demographic data at both the site and individual search term level.  Another feature shows top sites visited by term searchers, highlighting destinations that are popular for searchers regardless of click-throughs.  And lastly, comScore Marketer calculates actual clicks for search terms (percentages are also shown).

Coming Attractions

The focus of this write-up is on products with a distinct click-based search intelligence component.   With my next post, I’ll look at a few of the other post-click research products like Compete.

Other planned articles for the near future include pre-click search tools that focus primarily on ads served, and finally an overview of key online audience measurement tools (unique site visitors, clickstreams) which would include not only Compete, comScore and Hitwise, but also Nielsen NetRatings, Alexa and several others.

Click here for Part 2 of the Keyword Research Tools Guide which looks at Compete.

Glenn Lalich is VP of Research & Analysis at PM Digital.